Culture of Life Financial News

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Friday, March 10, 2006

Bill For Stupid War Rises: $91 Billion! Insane.

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Even as they discuss draconian cuts to social services and education, Congress and Bush continue to lavish hundreds of billions on their illegal war in Iraq. Meanwhile, consumer confidence is dropping, oil is going up in price, trade deficit yawns ever greater, Congress still hasn't voted for an even higher debt ceiling, they plan to raise it to $9 trillion bucks.

The House Appropriations Committee approved a $91 billion emergency spending bill late Wednesday that covers wartime and natural disaster costs and includes extra money for the Army and Marine Corps, who have complained about being shortchanged by the White House. It also includes trouble for President Bush.

I like the "and natural disasters" part because it is so stupid. I blogged here about hurricane Katrina and how everyone in DC was salivating over another $250 billion in red ink that they could spend here in America, fixing stuff that will be utterly destroyed this coming summer. Then reality in the form of some rather angry Chinese lenders threw cold water on that scheme. So now we are back to using unbudgeted "emergency funds" to pay for that stupid war in Iraq while we kick out children living in hotels who are refugees from hurricane Katrina.

The INDEPENDENCE® iBOT® 4000 Mobility System is unlike any mobility device. Its combination of unique, innovative functions allows you to go places and do things not possible with any other single mobility device.

Power across sand, gravel, grass and other uneven terrain, climb stairs with or without assistance, go up or down curbs as high as 5”, or easily rise to an “eye-level” position.

Isn't this pathetic? Should be a warning to anyone dreaming of joining the military. This chair is for profoundly disabled people who can't scoot around using their arms because they probably have no arms or are so banged up they can't have the strength to use their arms, even!

This is what our money is paying for: transforming healthy, young, vibrant people into quadrapedics. And then squeezing them because we can't pay for a bunch of people who lost life's lottery, this is the GOP attitude.

Lawmakers also found a way to provide extra money to the Department of Veterans Affairs for health care costs related to the war. They agreed to a bipartisan amendment — pushed by Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Tex. — that allows $275 million set aside to replace the New Orleans VA hospital destroyed by Hurricane Katrina to be used for health care expenses if it isn’t spent on hospital construction or design.

Note how they have to raid Peter's funds to pay Paul's mutilated body! Also note it was a Democrat pushing for this. Republicans would love to spend money building a hospital that will be destroyed by a hurricane in due time! They and their buddies in Kellogg, Root and Brown specialize in suctioning up public funds this way! It is also a very strange thing to do, building this hospital, since there are very few vets hanging around New Orleans right now who are sick or disabled since much of the population has been scattered to the four winds.

The really disgusting thing is, much of this money will be spent overseas. Even as our rulers scramble to cover the bills as Congress refuses to debate the terrible budget deficits that can be cured ONLY by raising taxes on the rich, this parody of a government thinks no one will notice the easy solution to this fiscal riddle (hint: taxing the rich the way they were taxed under Clinton, you bozos!).

Pentagon comptroller Tina Jonas told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday that the Defense Department needed the supplemental funding for Iraq and Afghanistan operations — $67.5 billion of the House committee bill — by no later than April 30 to avoid disrupting peacetime programs to pay for war-related costs. Meeting that deadline already was going to be difficult because the Senate Appropriations Committee doesn’t plan to start writing its version of the bill until the last week of March, leaving one month for full Senate passage and for a compromise.

Of that $67.5 billion for the quagmires, not one penny is for the fancy wheelchairs our soldiers need after being blasted to smithereens in this stupid quest for the Grail with Holes.

Meanwhile, back in the hinterlands, a place called "the USA", consumer confidence is dropping like Bush's popularity polls:From AP:

Consumer confidence dropped in early March as people fretted about the economy's performance and their own financial fate in the months ahead.

The RBC CASH Index, based on results from the international polling firm Ipsos, showed confidence at 86.2 in early March.

That was down considerably from February's reading of 96.1 — a 16-month high. But it was in the ballpark with consumers' feelings about economic conditions in March of last year, when the index stood at 84.2.

As interest rates rise and as inflation rages, people are getting scared. And the weather is getting pretty scary, too. Spring is here, She is already mowing down homes and killing people. Mother Nature's temper is heating up along with the rest of the ecosystem. The angrier She gets, the worse for us. No one can be as murderous as She when She loses it. Ask the creatures who died when the habitat became nearly unbearable back during the Permian extinction!

That other barometer of stormy weather, the Dubai Port Deal, continues to blow at hurricane force winds. The latest scheme for this shows how our traitors in the White House operate. From the BBC:

Dubai Ports World (DPW) is to transfer its US ports business to a "US entity" to end a row over its takeover of P&O.

While DPW has not explicitly said it will sell the subsidiaries responsible for the ports, the White House is suggesting this will be the end result.

Shall we have a contest to name this entity? The guys who will be the front company? That will sort of own the company but be totally beholden to the sheiks who funded bin Laden. Well, I nominate Halliburton and Carlyle. Both are also intimately entwined with the bin Ladens and the Sheiks and Bush is a great kisser and lord only knows what services he provides in private! He certainly loves to talk about how men look "fabulous" while carrying his doggie like a purse and rubbing bald heads in public and the kissing and hand holding of the real rulers? Ack. The least this clown could do is give gays civil rights for crying out loud.

Then I could praise him for something, anything.

"All of the other terminals on both coasts are run by foreign-owned companies, so it is not clear who is going to take over," said Sidney Levine, a maritime economist.

And trade experts said the outcome will set a damaging precedent for other Middle Eastern companies planning to invest in the US.

"This will send a chilling signal," said Daniel Griswold, director of the Cato Institute's Centre for Trade Policy Studies.

This is all so ridiculous. The media and the political traitors don't want to talk about how even our very ports are now out of our control. How damaging this is. How we are reaping zero benefits from this out of control "free trade". How this is destroying our infrastructure, our economy, our very lives.

Consumers are terrified at the rising interest rates. They want to live like kings while going bankrupt like kings. All kings go bankrupt because no one can say no to them which is why England, for example, had many a literal battle to rein in the king such as the famous one that led to the Magna Carta, just for example! Not to mention the American Revolution which was over trade and tax matters! If our ancestors were willing to fight and die so they could control their ports, control their industries, geeze in jumping crickets, why are we throwing all this away?

Well, we are burning the Constitution. So maybe it doesn't matter any more. Serfs are up!

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Yet again, this last month's trade deficit is horrendous. Grinning moronically, our pundits and rulers assure us this is a good thing, no one, especially a very angry China is going to chop our silly heads off, are they? And the Japanese and Saudis won't shove us into wars they want us to fight for them? Gads. Are we doomed.Note that socialist, non-oil exporting Germany and cheap yen Japan are at the top of the positive trade flow list here. And America at the bottom absolutely dwarfs all the other red ink nations, we are several hundred billion greater than the deficits of all other countries put together.

The nation's trade deficit widened to another record in January, the government reported today, as the strengthening American economy attracted a surge of imported cars, household goods and petroleum products.

Text: U.S. Trade ReportAmericans imported $68.5 billion more in goods and services than they exported at the start of the year, up 5.3 percent from December, the Commerce Department said. It exceeded the previous record in October, when the deficit swelled to $67.8 billion.

A 3.5 percent jump in imports in January appear to reflect the sharply higher consumer spending during the month and rising price of oil, gasoline and other energy products. Automobile and car parts imports increased 5.3 percent during the month and the country spent 4.3 percent more on petroleum-based imports.

In turn, since interest rates are still (as always these days) below the rate of inflation and the interest offered for "saving" money is woefully behind the rate of inflation, no one saves and everyone spends as fast as possible and combined together, this increases importation of goods that have been scrubbed of inflationary forces and voila, we have a trade deficit of nearly a trillion unsustainable dollars.

Aesop's Ant and Grasshopper Story is one we easily misinterpet. The ant plans ahead for bad times and works in concert with other ants (this is the important part) to insure the ant community can live through the winter of hard times. The grasshopper doesn't cooperate with anyone and happily hops about, stuffing its face and living hand to mouth. Then it dies in winter. Just call it a libertarian or Republican.

Ahem. Even the NYT admits that the Boeing contracts are being counted in a big way to "balance" our trade only it barely makes a dent, doesn't it? Maybe the nuclear contracts for India will save us!

The Chinese are buying fewer factories from us so that part of the trade balance isn't doing very well, is it? Could it be, we are running out of factories to dismantle? Geeze. Here is a graph showing foreign ownership of American debts and other goodies.

It ain't pretty.Like our trade deficit, in the exact same timeframe, starting in 1983 under Herr Ronald "Give me $2.5 million, please, Japan!" Reagan. He made a neat deal with Japan. To make our inflation disappear, the Japanese would soak up the red ink our government began to grind out that year to pay for the Laffer Curve tax cuts. Once this system was set up, it ran awfully nice, for FOREIGN POWERS. Others piggybacked into the system. I even explained how it worked to the Chinese so they could grasp what "traitor" means. They are in absolute awe of the propaganda machine that kept Reagan in power and popular even until this traitor's death.

No one has been able to pull our country out of this nose dive. Clinton and Rubins gave it a shot but hit so much flack, they had to give it up. This is because the bait: cheap interest below inflation and exporting of said inflation is just jim dandy for nearly everyone even as the downside to all this becomes increasingly obvious to even Republican right wingers. But like crack addicts on cheap speed, we can't drop the pipe or stop injecting.

You know what happens to crack/speed freaks. The become violent and end up dead.

America’s chronic trade deficit continues to set new records, both for its sheer size in nominal terms and for its share of an expanding gross national product. The record deficit is fueling worry that it could hurt U.S. industry, destroy jobs, burden future generations, and cause the current economic expansion to end in a “hard landing.” But those worries rest on a fun-damental misunderstanding of the causes and consequences of the U.S. trade deficit.

In November 2000 the congressionally appointed Trade Deficit Review Commis-sion issued its final report, The U.S. Trade Deficit: Causes, Consequences and Recom-mendations for Action. The report reflected the views of a sharply divided commission, with Democratic-appointed members warning of the dangers of the deficit while Republican-appointed members empha-sized its more benign nature.

Economic theory and experience demonstrate that trade deficits are driven primarily by macroeconomic factors, in particular investment flows, and not by allegedly unfair trade barriers or declining industrial competitiveness.

This is the sort of insane tripe our rulers read to each other lest they feel a twinge of guilt. The headline of this article is hilarous: "America's Record Trade Deficit--A Symbol of Economic Strength". Truly, this is deep inside Orwellian Language Use. *************************************************************Previous Similar Articles*************************************************************To return to homepage click hereTo read more science news click hereWashington Pest

Japan Raising Interest Rates At Home---Just Joking

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Japan grandly announces they will raise interest rates at home someday when the moon falls and pigs fly. Of course, we are all supposed to watch the yuan and worry about China's financing, right? Right. Pay no attention to the Three Card Monte Player.

The Bank of Japan on Thursday abandoned the super-easy monetary policy it has kept for five years, saying it will gradually raise interest rates and start to cut the excess cash in the banking system amid signs of economic recovery.

But the central bank sent a clear message that the transition will be slow, saying benchmark interest rates will remain near zero for some time and that it will only gradually reduce the amount of liquidity in the banking system over several months.

"Interest rates will stay at zero for some time, then stay extremely low and go through an adjustment period," Bank of Japan Gov. Toshihiko Fukui said a press conference. "It's up to the economy how much and when."

I used to work for a German corporation on 43rd St and Park Ave in Manhattan and I took the subway to work and thus, passed through Time Square and 42nd Street a lot. Lots of Japanese tourists and lots of three card Monte players littered the landscape. I suppose, in their youth, some of the Japanese bankers were exposed to this game.

Whenever a police car passes by, you can observe how quickly these games disperse. Sidewalk card games are both illegal and fraudulent for some very good reasons.Scenario

Two or more people are standing around a cardboard box on a busy street trying to win money by choosing the correct card out of the three cards shuffled.

You notice that someone seems to be winning; this person is usually working with the dealer to lure people in. People who work these scams know that it will be less suspicious to plant a women or someone in a business suit in the game.

The shuffler will purposely lose the first few rounds to get you to bet more money.

At this point, if you take your wallet out, someone may grab it and run -OR- it will be pick pocketed as you watch the game.

If by some fluke you win, you may be followed and mugged.How to avoid thisThe hand is quicker than the eye and these are pros. Don't play - YOU CANNOT WIN!

From the official NY police warning. The Japanese bankers are very anxious that no one who can influence economic events notice the sleigh of hand going on here. Our rulers, the traitors driving us all into economic slavery, also want to hide the card and pick our pockets. Between these two, we are being fleeced, you notice. I hope.

The Japanese successfully got Bush and Condi and much of our government to join them in attacking China's influence on our financial markets. The Japanese, like myself, noticed that China has rapidly caught up with Japan and now has as large a foreign reserve as Japan. They don't have the same, smooth interface between the industrial bosses and the government which exists soley for their own purposes but Japan had to throw a spanner into the spokes of the Chinese financial machine before it begins to run over Japanese feet.

Which are firmly planted on our necks.

These manipulations have finally been noticed by people who aren't just my readers so Japan has to throw some sand into our eyes, thus the promise to raise interest rates they charge only themselves, someday, maybe, when they feel good and ready. This is so stupid. They aren't loaning US money at this rate, only themselves. This is an unfair trade practice since our businesses must pay much more to get loans, just for one example. The other is the pathetic yen, kept ridiculously cheap deliberately by currency manipulations that are hostile to our own country. The Chinese know we can't muscle them because we can't get Japan's boot off our own necks. If we do enough reforms to fix the obvious currency imbalances, this would mean an end to the program of sucking out American industry and replacing it with cheap American labor assembling products for Asian owners here at home.

Get the drift? No unions, no high pay, no profits. Just Mexican-style labor relations. And guess what? The Mexicans don't love us for doing this to them, do they?

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

GOP Tax Cutters Want To Slit America's Throat

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The GOP, after blatantly lying about tax cuts and war, now want us to follow their bitter Trail of Tax Tears to the obvious end: the deaths of millions of Americans. They won't recind a single tax cut to the rich. They think they can drink our blood, our sweat and our tears.

With Congress heading into a politically perilous budget season, influential House conservatives plan this week to propose an austere alternative spending plan that would pare more than $650 billion over five years, balance the budget and drastically shrink three cabinet agencies.

Of course, 100% of the cuts come at the expense of the young, the old and the middle aged. Anyone who isn't very rich or very strong or both. This Terminator Budget was the GOP plan from day one: to drive up the debt until draconian cuts eliminate "excess population." These same clowns are now on the warpath to force women to have babies. This is for war purposes only. Any woman wanting to stay alive past 50 will need at least three sons so the one who dies in war and the one worked to death won't matter, she will be supported by the remaining son, this is exactly how the Third World works with an insanely high birthrate and of course, high death rate.

"We can't be all things to all people when it comes to spending the taxpayers' money," Mr. Bush said at a ceremony installing a new chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

For the most part, the men paying Bush big bucks to rule over us don't want to share a thin dime with us. And his words are a declaration of war against the poor, the elderly, the sick.

Even with all this stuff, the numbers are a total disaster. First, the government and the media have lied consistently from 2000 onwards. They always include our Social Security money in the debt calculations so the extra $200 billion a year doesn't show up. So when the deficit is supposedly "only" $350 billion it acutally is over $500 billion. Looking at the debt ceiling which has to be raised nearly every year, Bush's tax cuts and wild military spending has cost us an extra $2.5 TRILLION.

The draconian, deadly cuts the GOP right wing Nazis want don't work at all. $650 billion divided by 5= $130 billion. OK, at no time has the deficit, under Bush and the GOP been less than $300 billion, often over that. So this leaves yet another $130+billion that has to be cut if Americans don't want to tax the extremely wealthy. Not one Republican is calling for restoring taxes to the sane level they were at under Clinton. This just isn't in their vocalulary.

Starve the poor? Yup. Let the elderly die in the gutter? Check! No schooling for our kids? Gotcha!

Under the proposal, expected to be introduced by Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, and Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas, military spending would continue to rise, administration tax cuts would be protected and Social Security would be spared. But many other programs and foreign aid would be greatly scaled back.

We spend over $2 billion a week in Iraq. Our coming war with Iran won't come cheap, either, since they plan to strike back by cuttting off oil to the coalition of Neo-nazi states. This is going to send all of us who use oil into the poorhouse but will make Bush's supporters extremely rich, they can't wait.

Democrats hope to use the upcoming congressional debate over raising the debt limit to highlight what they see as the failings of the administration's economic program with its emphasis on sweeping tax cuts.

An actual default on the debt, a situation when the government misses making payments to current bondholders, is a doomsday scenario considered highly unlikely given what it would do to the government's credit rating.

It is expected that after intense debate, Congress will approve an increase in the current $8.18 trillion debt limit by perhaps $781 billion.

If the Democrats want "an intense debate" they could use my many cartoons on this subject. Maybe that might penetrate thick skulls. Or not.

Giving Bush $781 billion will simply mean he and his buddies will pocket the entire amount, in general, in less than a year. Since our budget deficit has tracked the trade deficit very closely---and that was nearly a trillion last year!---I expect the budget deficit to do the same.

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said last week that under President Bush the total of the deficits has increased by $3 trillion, a 40 percent increase from where the national debt _ the total of previous deficits _ stood when Bush took office in January 2001.

Now this interestes me because the supposed raise since Bush stole the election in 2000 is supposed to be $2.4 Trillion red ink. I suspect the amount is very much closer to his than my conservative account.

Treasury officials, briefing congressional aides last week, said that the government will run out of maneuvering room to keep from exceeding the current limit sometime during the week of March 20.

Deliberately starting a war with Iran fixes this! The need for increasing the insane amount we waste on our imperial/private military machine will be self evident as everyone is herded into the cattle pen to be shipped off to do or die.

Rationing, pinning down the population, "sacrifices" will be the order of the day as the men ruining our lives scream we must do these destructive things or the Iranians will destroy America. This is why I am expecting war. Note that at all times, our rulers pretend they don't have to consult with anyone including Congress over matters of war or peace or spying on Americans.

The government net is far and wide thanks to seemingly unlimited funding for spying on Americans. From Scripp's Howard:

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.

These actions aren't for catching "terrorists" for any logical thinking immediately shows the stupidity of this. People going on terrorist binges run UP bills, not pay them off! If you aren't going to be around to pay, why pay up?

Of course, this is to catch drug dealers for the nasty, pointless, stupid, unconstitutional war against people consuming garbage means funding a giant police state which is now utterly out of control and is rapidly morphing into a punitive police state that, in classic fashion, will bleed the country dry. This happens to all military empires and will kill our own empire.

Click here to see the Concord Coalition graph for the budget deficit.One line of this graph, the one supposing Bush and the GOP get all their tax cuts (seems no limit to these buggers!) what the projecting deficit will be in 2024: -$850 billion a year! Well, actually, this is assuming the numbers are not fake for today and the deficit is only $350 billion and not $500 billion which is what it actually is.

Drawing a line from $500 billion, the projection is much worse at $1.3 trillion a year, a hopelessly unsustainable amount.

U.S. stocks traded lower Tuesday afternoon in a market concerned about rising interest rates, with the technology sector pacing the decline after a disappointing sales outlook from Texas Instruments.

Once again, the stock market is floundering and it is obvious why. The entire economy, this pathetic "Martha Steward" fix our homes economy is now on its last red ink legs. Fueled by public and private loans lent at ruinous rates thanks to foreign governments lending us money, this is suddenly drying up as it always happens in such cases.

On Monday, the yield on the benchmark 10-year note reached its highest level since June 2004, the month during which the Federal Reserve began putting in place what's been a program of steady, quarter-point rate hikes.

Concerns about rates intensified after St. Louis Federal Reserve President William Poole, widely considered to be hawkish on inflation, said the Fed may have to "step a little harder on the brake."

See the trap? Inflation was supposed to be caused by high wages. Not oil. This stupid lie was repeated by zillions of stupid "economists" and politicians until they convinced themselves of this. Worse, they pretended they controlled interest rates. Worse, they let China know we are now at their mercy by demanding China change their currency to suit us and when China refused, we asked for more loans! Hahaha. Talk about dumb.

Now, as the housing boom goes boom, the Fed is going to "put on the brakes harder"? Um, won't that cause our pretty little car to crash? Or is there a wall or cliff straight ahead? Skidding sideways into it or off it won't save us, will it?

Monday, March 06, 2006

Even as the major media pushes for the destruction of America by sucking all our jobs, all of them, to hostile or potentially hostile lands, the negotiators writing treaties and trade issues openly end up working for foreign powers that plan to strip us clean of everything we own. Arrest them all. Or at least, force them to move to the countries they really represent like Dubai.

Globalization scares people. Security threats scare people. By fusing these fears during the Dubai ports flap, demagogues have had a field day. Now, having demonstrated this formula, the demagogues are poised to strike again. Their next target will be arriving soon, in the person of President Hu Jintao of China.

For a fear monger with a club, next month's Chinese state visit is a self-teeing golf ball. China accounts for more than a quarter of America's astonishing trade deficit, and the country has become a proxy for all globalization anxieties: It's painted as a low-wage threat and simultaneously a high-science threat, a piratical menace to technology patents and simultaneously a challenge to America's scientific preeminence. Meanwhile, China constitutes a security threat, too: It's spending billions on an arms buildup, and lying about the real numbers. If demagogues can turn a tiny ally such as Dubai into a villain, you can bet they'll do the same for China.

Dubai is a rat's nest, it is our Casablanca circa WWII, corrupt, leaches, buying Americans and using them to influence us.

For example, one of the negotiators of the Dubai port business is now working for...DUBAI. From Raw Story:

A British security firm headquartered in Dubai has won lucrative contracts for U.S. security in Iraq and the United States, providing security in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and training Iraqi port security officers under the Coalition Provisional Authority, RAW STORY has found.

The firm, the Olive Group, is largely comprised of ex-British intelligence officers. While a British company, its main headquarters are in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates city that caused a stir when it was revealed that the Emirates were set to take over control of 21 U.S. ports. Olive was founded in 2001.

The revelation that a Dubai-based firm provides security consulting for myriad U.S. operations at home and abroad shows the increasing tendency of the U.S. government to privatize security efforts. It comes on the same day that the Drudge Report discovered that a foreign company handles security at an Indianapolis airport.

And more and more of our security is being farmed out by "Homeland Security" which is run by a dual citizen from the Middle East, to the Middle East itself. Evidently, the people defending us want to make money from our enemies and they are bending their massive wills to convince Americans that Dubai is our "ally" and that working for a sheik rather than America is OK.

This sort of childish talk is at the root of our increasing defeat at home and overseas.

The firm’s attorneys are Baker, Botts, LLP – a lawfirm where former Secretary of State to President George H. W. Bush is a partner. Baker Botts opened an office in Dubai last year.

Our government serves rank traitors who are in the pay or want to be in the pay of foreign powers. This is the most serious breech of America's defences since...the founding of this nation! The collective treason on so many levels by so many men is astonishing as well as destructive. Note that our nation is falling to its knees!

I just learned that one of the negotiators of the India nuke deal is now working for India! Asian Times:

Keeping with the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy, the deal was cooked by a handful of senior officials (one of whom is now a lobbyist for the Indian government) and never reviewed by the departments of State, Defense or Energy before it was announced with a champagne toast by Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Congress was never consulted. Republican committee staff say the first members heard about it was when the fax announcing the deal came into their offices. Worse, for the president, this appears to be another give away to a foreign government at the expense of US national-security interests.

Amazing, isn't it? Everyone in our empire, everyone running it, is for sale. Our enemies are sniffing around our defenses and these TRAITORS are handing over our joint security, lock, stock and gun barrel. This is truly the biggest, most idiotic absurdity ever in the history of humanity. Bush still enjoys totally undeserved support for "defending America" which is the result of cynical propaganda foisted upon the trusting public.

The Indian leaders and press are crowing about their victory over the United States. For good reason: President Bush has done what Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and his own father refused to do - break US and international law to aid India's nuclear-weapons program. In 1974, India cheated on its agreements with the United States and other nations to do what Iran is accused of doing now: using a peaceful nuclear energy program to build a nuclear bomb. India used plutonium produced in a Canadian-supplied reactor to detonate a bomb it then called a "peaceful nuclear device". In response, president Richard Nixon and Congress stiffened US laws and Nixon organized the Nuclear Suppliers Group to prevent any other nation from following India's example.

Bush has now unilaterally shattered those guidelines, and his action would violate the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) proscription against aiding another nation's nuclear-weapons program. It would require the repeal or revision of several major US laws, including the US Nonproliferation Act. Nor has he won any significant concessions from India. India refuses to agree to end its production of nuclear-weapons material, something the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China have already done.

As I noted when the media was crowing about Bush selling the Indians everything including the kitchen sink for a handful of headlines, I noted this was a tremendous failure, his "deals" makes America significantly weaker and he has increased their ability to hollow out the white collar workplace here in America, this alone is reason to arrest Bush and charge him with treason.

Selling our jobs to other nations is treason! Destroying millions of American's lives and futures is treason. Making our country dependent upon foreigners who aren't even allies is treason. Sending our sensitive work to aliens is treason. We will discover the down side of all this when the world unites to kick us out of the commodities markets which they will do, this is the PLAN.

Bush violated numerous treaties when he signed diplomatic understandings with India not to mention Pakistan, actually, JAPAN, too as well as clever China who has us by the throat!

Guess what? The bond market is going crazy. Right after our government claimed future interest rates will be LOWER than present ones, this fiction collapsed today sending the Stock Market pin wheeling into space. Bernanke will print more money, gods know how much, it is now officially hidden from us, no more M3 stats! Rats! Anyway, he is a traitor, they are all traitors. They think their jobs will never be shipped overseas. Fools. Their jobs can dissappear in a wink. Anyone's can! Ask Hitler!

Negroponte, on the the architects of this treasonous disaster is having a good old time, just like his bosses, goofing off while selling us into slavery. From the Public cq.:

On many a workday lunchtime, the nominal boss of U.S. intelligence, John D. Negroponte, can be found at a private club in downtown Washington, getting a massage, taking a swim, and having lunch, followed by a good cigar and a perusal of the daily papers in the club’s library.

“He spends three hours there [every] Monday through Friday,” gripes a senior counterterrorism official, noting that the former ambassador has a security detail sitting outside all that time in chase cars. Others say they’ve seen the Director of National Intelligence at the University Club, a 100-year-old mansion-like redoubt of dark oak panels and high ceilings a few blocks from the White House, only “several” times a week.

Surely Negroponte needs a comfort zone, forced as he is to spends hours in the witness chair in front of congressional committees, fielding hot potatoes on subjects over which he has no control — the NSA’s warrantless surveillance, domestic spying by secret military intelligence units, paying newspapers in Iraq to run pro-U.S. stories.

He doesn't care. Wolfowitz got to escape America and relocate into Europe. They all plan to jump ship when the time is ripe.

World markets are shaking as if the San Andreas is about to blow, which it is. They smell blood in the water, they know the Chinese, tremendously angry about our wimpy response to the Taiwan challenge when they pretty much ditched even the fiction of reunification. Taiwan is the knife pointed at China's belly and they won't let us get away with pretending we have no control over this situation.

The Chinese planned from day one to use the financial tools against us. The fact that the only way we can gain "influence and allies" is to bribe people and sell off more American realestate, jobs, businesses, security, everything, is a sign our ship is sinking fast.

The fake loans going for less than the rate of inflation thanks to the Chinese and Japanese bankrolling it is falling apart. The dollar has risen against the yen and the yuan thanks to the need to go to China and Japan and pay increasingly ruinious interest rates for more loans.

This takes me back to the free traders: if they can't see our ship is sinking I would like to drop them off, the rats they are, in India and China and let them do business there. I know, they won't last more than 24 hrs.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Ma Bell Rebuilds Monopoly Powers

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Thanks to our stupid emperor, Bush, we have all these entities forming huge monopolies and cartels all so they can exploit us. My phone bill shot up this month and it comes as no surprise that Ma Bell's tentacles are reaching into my pocketbook.

As a result, consumers already buying services from AT&T, BellSouth and Cingular are unlikely to be affected directly. But the purchase would give AT&T more firepower to fight Comcast and other cable television companies that are quickly moving into the phone business.

A union between AT&T and BellSouth had been long rumored because of their mutual stake in the fast-growing wireless industry. In a statement this afternoon, AT&T's chairman and chief executive, Edward E. Whitacre Jr., called the deal "a next logical step" and asserted that the merger "will strengthen Cingular through unified ownership and a single brand."

Mr. Whitacre added, "No partnership between two independent companies, no matter how well run, can match the speed, effectiveness, responsiveness and efficiency of a solely owned company."

Bullshit. I must have spent half of my waking hours fighting Ma Bell back when she was a monopoly. Every time I moved and I moved a lot, I had nonstop battles over billing, service and in general, a rotten time. I hated the phone company.

Once, I bought a roominghouse which had a Bell payphone in the lobby. They wouldn't let me keep it but they wouldn't take it and we fought over that phone for about a year.

I remember these guys because they charged an arm and a leg for touch tone phones. The wretches. And color? Whoo hoo. Pay up, bud! You owned nothing, the wires, the phones, everything was "rented." Which is why I had continuous battles with them every time I moved.

When Ma Bell was broken up, I was estatic. And gloomy. I knew, thanks to lobbyists working like termites deep inside the superstructure of DC, they would reassemble this monster and unleash it upon us customers and lo and behold, here it is, acoming!

They hate the net because many of us no longer use any telephones to communicate, we use the net. I pay a lot for my highspeed DSL service and I use it a lot so it is worth it but geeze. Ma Bell lusts for some scheme to make lots of money on my use, I remember the bad old days when people were charged by the hour for internet service in some places!

Pricewaterhouse Projections Shows China Beating US And Europe By 2050

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Analysts at Pricewaterhouse project that China will "dwarf" all G7 nations by 2050 based on present trends. This comes as no surprise to me but it does leave out the effects of the Hubbert Oil Peak. Probably, thanks to all businesses wanting to squeeze out inflation, the relocation of all factories to China will probably happen much faster, I am guessing, twice as fast.

China's economy is projected to grow so fast that it could outstrip all developed nations by 2050, a report by Pricewaterhouse says.The Asian giant's economy is set to double in size between 2005 and 2050, according to the report.

As with other developing countries, a key driver for China's rapid growth is its younger, cheaper workforce, it argues.

Throughout history, the Chinese peasants have had a reputation for hard work. This is why immigrants from Europe, pouring into America during the 19th century, were violently hostile to any Chinese incursions. Building the railroad through the Sierras, though, was so terrifyingly brutal, Asian immigration was loosened to allow some workers in. But even this caused a wave of fear in the European community which has a much more laid-back attitude towards hard work.

Factories with a sullen, slow moving, often overweight workforce that feels hard labor stinks will be beaten in competition with factories working at full speed with motivated, fast moving workers. At first, we prided ourselves on using robots to finesse the work and speed production but that wasn't sufficient.

The quality of the labor force matters. This is why people claiming we will move factories from China to wherever are foolish. These factories ain't leaving Asia so fast. In most other countries, the peasants know toil and hardship but for some reason, don't have the work ethic of the Chinese (or the mountain free farm folk, for that matter!) Cultural differences do matter. The desire for perfectionism plus the desire to log long hours to build up surpluses equals dynamic cultures.

Ancient Egypt hit upon this nexus and made some of the greatest human works of art and building. For a brief while, the ancient Greeks honed a very dynamic culture build on the base of freeholding peasants, multi-tasking like crazy. Often such cultures deteriorate and the populace grows lazy and abusive such as the free farmers of ancient Rome who lost their culture of hard work nearly immediately.

The wide American farmlands used to be the nursery of hard working, intelligent, get-up-and=go workforce but the padded life of imperialism has caused a huge deterioration in the work ethic and ability to think and organize. Flaccid and weak, the work force stands agape as their lifestyles and futures slip away to greener pastures.

Even the smallest moves away from this looming disaster can't seem to motivate the workers in America. They seem bent on some easy trick to get out of the trap, namely, gambling. Gambling has exploded across the country and now is probably the chief form of "entertainment" except anyone going to any casino knows the people there are hard at work, trying to con their way to a lazy lifestyle.

There is little pleasure or joy.PwC is basing its analysis on forecasts for economic growth on the basis of purchasing power parity (PPP).

This figure defines the size of an economy by adjusting for local costs.

While China's economy is currently 18% the size of the US's in dollar terms, it is 76% as big on a PPP basis.

One reason we are going bankrupt is because we want to keep up purchasing power via various tricks and strategems. One is to ship out all possible jobs to China so we can tap cheap labor. The other is to not pay as we go but wrack up ruinous debts. The third is to gamble. I will note, 90% of the businesses being rebuilt in the Gulf that hire more than 20 people are virtually all entertainment or gambling ventures.

By 2050, PwC believes, it could be 43% bigger than the US by PPP - although it would still lag when measured in terms of dollar size.

By 2050. we will be, relative to China, twice as poor. Think about this! Will the Chinese relocate factories here at that point?

I seriously doubt it. For they know the other side of the deal: if you move your businesses out, the country collapses. The Chinese understand this quite well. They listen to Western economists but they also listen to other voices and they are most anxious Americans don't figure out this riddle so they won't say anything outloud just yet, but you can bet, they will trumpet it in the end: "Gotcha!"

Meanwhile, our own benighted economists can't put 2+2 together. Beholden to the mythology that free trade=eternal wealth without working much, they puzzle over the signs of American fiscal collapse. From AP:

Now that America's savings rate has been negative for an entire year, a first since the Great Depression, the question is whether we're a spendthrift nation on its way to the poor house or whether we're looking at the wrong numbers when we calculate savings.

The personal savings rate is, essentially, the amount of after-tax income left once household bills are paid. Maybe it's $75 for a household, maybe it's $7,500, but as a percentage of income, it's declining. The personal savings rate used to be 10 percent of disposable income from 1974 to 1984, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It fell to 4.8 percent by 1994, and was negative for all of 2005. As of January, the personal savings rate was minus 0.7 percent.

Idiots like Bernanke boasted that China was in a savings glut so we didn't need to save, they would work hard and foot our bills forever and forever! This childish idea is a sign of mental rot that has killed all previous empires that decided to pretend reality is fake.

Instead of being alarmed and fixing our savings deficit by pegging interest rates at a realistic level that would attract savings, our government did the exact opposite making our fiscal situation much worse over the short run and the long run for we don't have too many more years to run this scam because the basis of it, China lending us cheap dollars, is predicated only on the Chinese secret plan to suck up all major American industries and then spit us out. They only have the auto and aerospace industries left and are making great ground on both, quite rapidly.

Some economists say that's far-fetched. They argue the personal savings figures are artificially low, since the numbers don't include increases in assets such as equities and homes. Yale University economics professor William D. Nordhaus made that argument in 2002 congressional testimony, saying that once assets were included, the savings rate for the 1990s would have been a robust 25 percent.

This is pure bullshit. I always warn people not to bank on the value of their homes because it is only worth what someone wants to pay for it and you can't tell until the day arrives that you try to sell it. So it can appear to be worth $500,000 but when the economy goes bad and you want the money to retire and no one can buy it for more than $150,000, then you are screwed, big time. This is why I view the value of my homes I build and design as homes until I sell. Then, if the market is right, I can make some good money.

Baby boomers will be dumping a huge number of unwieldy houses into a declining market when they retire. Since everyone wants to move to the hurricane/drought/overheating zones, this means a train wreck especially since the need for a playground/goof off culture will increase hugely, I see no "work ethic" appearing on any horizon. In China, the elderly raise the grandkids, for example.

Here, they run away as far as possible. I know that I had to raise my children while working long hours. It was very difficult.

In a dead market, all the equities and stocks assembled for good times will jointly lose value if there are no buyers. This is why depressions happen and why merely saving up isn't enough. One has to be vigilant like a hawk to prevent social/economic problems to accumulate and sink one's own ship.

Along much of the East and West Coasts, home buyers and home sellers are engaged in a stare-down.

Many buyers, having heard that the real estate market is a bubble in danger of popping, are refusing to offer the asking price on a house, convinced that it will soon drop. But many sellers are not blinking either, thinking that offers will improve when the weather does and biding their time until then.

As a result, the housing market is now in a deeply confusing state, with average prices still rising even though homes are taking much longer to sell and the number on the market has soared. Sometime soon — probably in the spring, the peak sales season — one side or the other will have to capitulate, many economists and industry executives predict.

Instead of rushing to close, everyone is playing the waiting game. Guess who prevails!

The buyers. Always. I used to lecture people about "the pie in the sky and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow." To illustrate this, I have many stories of people I have known who put a property on the market. As prices go up, they raise their price. Then, in a panic, they drop them as prices drop but never quite catch up until they sell at the very bottom for a great loss. Homebuyers know the relative value of a property to the last penny. If one doesn't bag a buyer pretty quickly, the property is either overpriced or unsellable.

I usually had a property for sale for less than one week. Price it right, people will bid up the price! So I let them set the price, in the end, but the lower price always lures more than one, often as many as ten, bidders.

The fact that buyers are waiting means prices will fall and fall since the longer you wait, the greater the benefit. All buyers know, instinctively, when they have the upper hand. Sellers seldom go to house openings. When I sell, I go all over kingdom come, checking out the competition. This is very salutory.

In Buxton, Me., a suburb of Portland, Geof and Cheri Toner put their three-bedroom Cape Cod-style house on the market for $379,900 late last year, shortly before moving to Raleigh, N.C., for Mr. Toner's job. They have received only one offer — for $350,000, which they rejected — and recently reduced the price to $374,900.

Mr. Toner said he assumed that more buyers would look at the property as the weather warmed up. In the spring, they would not have to wonder whether snow covered up flaws in the lawn or the roof. He expects that the eventual buyer will be a transplant from elsewhere in New England who is willing to pay significantly more than $350,000.

Only one offer in several months? And the little greedy family turned it down? This is hoping some little green guy with a pot of gold will slide down a rainbow and buy their place? Fools.

General rule of thumb: if there is only one offer within the first week, take it.

Many real estate agents argue that people like the Toners are doing the right thing and that the market will not slump as it did a decade ago. The job market is now improving. The interest rate on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage remains just 5.79 percent, according to Bankrate.com. And the number of homes on the market remains far lower than in the early 1990's, relative to sales volumes, despite the recent increases.

Most realestate agents are fairly young and many operated only in the hot up and up climate. Whenever the market collapses, many agents turn in their badges and seek someone else to skin. Right now, the market is filled with people who have virtually no idea how to sell in a hard market or how to advise families selling in a hard market.

The pros are already bailing out. They need to unload the last of their value added land to someone, anyone and already, they are beginning to panic, feeling in their bones, if they don't unload by June, they are cooked. Once the market turns down for good, it slides very quickly into red ink territory.

Acting as if grooming and building private homes is a sustainable industry in a global economy is sheer stupidity. Our houses can't be shipped (I hope) to India or China. The relative value of these houses hinge on our jobs not being shipped out. Yet this is what we are doing.

Alas. During my childhood, the mansions of the twenties littered the landscape. They were called "White Elephants."

Friday, March 03, 2006

Bush Is Boeing Salesman And Works For Corporate Headquarters Outsourcing White Collar Jobs

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Bush blandly tells white collar workers that they will have fabulous new jobs if all their work is outsourced to India. India cheers him for saying this, after all, they pay zero American taxes on their labor so they can undercut competition in America! Whoopee! Meanwhile, our aerospace industry is interested in selling jets since this is all we have left to sell that is labor intensive capitalism. This leads to arming India and Pakistan. Also, Bush surrenders totally on the nuclear bomb issue, of course.

President Bush met with Indian entrepreneurs and toured an agricultural university during a four-hour trip to the southern city of Hyderabad today, when he said that the United States should welcome rather than fear competition from India.

President Bush watched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice walk through a receiving line at a state dinner in New Delhi Thursday. The president is on his first visit to India, and is to continue on to Pakistan tonight.

"People do lose jobs as a result of globalization and it's painful for those who lose jobs," Mr. Bush said at meeting with young entrepreneurs at Hyderabad's Indian School of Business, one of the premier schools of its kind in India. Nonetheless, the president said, "globalization provides great opportunities.

Shorter Bush: "I don't feel your pain."

Globalization does give great opportunities....for people who are traitors. The job losses are not being replaced with fabulous new jobs that pay more and do more, this is an across the board dissipation of the core of America's industrial and technological base. It has very dire downsides such as the demoralization of any American wanting to make a career in the sciences. You can't get work! No one wants to hire an American anymore. Even at lower pay. Because you are a citizen, you have some bare protections whereas green card workers can be fired and deported the minute they irritate the bosses.

So they never strike, never go looking for a better job, they give no hassles. The proliferation of these workers has downsides including the garbled language problems as more and more people do technical work and can't speak or write English very well.

Just like in the Roman empire, this fuels a spiral to the bottom. Education fails, multilingualism without comprehension causes the imperial tongue to deteriorate into exclusive sub-languages such as happened to the Roman empire deteriorating into Spanish, French, English, German, Italian, etc.

"The classic opportunity for our American farmers and entrepreneurs and small businesses to understand is there is a 300 million-person market of middle class citizens here in India, and that if we can make a product they want, that it becomes viable," Mr. Bush said at the business school.

Oh, yeah, we are going to see what small farmers and small businesses exporting to India? Huh?

Worse, this would merely undermine Indian farmers. But then, Europe's farmers are exporting food but they do this under European export umbrella organizations and even this is dicey, note how Danish food is now being boycotted by a billion people! Indians have no reason to want to buy American produce any more than the Japanese who also protect their farmers and exclude foreign produce especially American.

What are we going to sell India? Beef? Like, their is a huge market for eating holy cows? Huh?

In Japan, beef is consumed, it is very expensive and we can't import beef there.

Mr. Bush returned to New Delhi later in the day to deliver an outdoor evening speech at the city's Purana Qila, a 16th century fort built by the Afghan conqueror Sher Sha Suri. In the speech, billed as the major address of Mr. Bush's trip to India, Mr. Bush spoke of the "natural partnership" between the United States and India, including the major nuclear pact that he and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India announced in New Delhi on Thursday.

The pact, which fills in the broad outlines of a plan that was negotiated in July, would help India satisfy its huge civilian energy needs while allowing it to continue to develop nuclear weapons.

Argh. So what Bush accomplished was the total surrender of America! We boycotted India, refusing to sell military stuff, because India build nukes! And we are threatening Iran for trying to emulate India? Huh?

This craven surrender is being trumpetted as some sort of victory. It is logical for India to arm itself with nukes just like it makes rational sense for Iran, even more so than India, to do the same. But we have to reconfigure the entire nonprolifieration treaty nonsense. Obviouisly, in a world destabilized by America's imperial wars, all nations must arm themselves with nukes as swiftly as possible. This won't stop WWIII but at least levels the playing ground, doesn't it?

Thursday, March 02, 2006

No More Global Savings Glut, Bernanke! Interest Rates Shoot Up World Wide

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The USA sucks up around 80% of all possible international funds of various sorts. This is to pay for the half trillion in government red ink and near trillion in trade deficits. In return, we printed money at an accelerated rate and now inflation is beginning to rage across the planet. Interest rates are shooting up and investment funds are vaporizing.

The European Central Bank (ECB) looks set to raise interest rates in the light of rising inflationary pressures in the eurozone.Economists are betting on a quarter percentage point rise in the cost of borrowing to 2.50% on Thursday.

The euro is the strongest currency right now so they don't have to defend it by raising interest rates alot.

Japan defends the yen by deliberately weakening it which is why their interest rates remain at a totally insane 0%. This is ridiculous since inflation is now raging in Tokyo according to on the street accounts. Even the prostitutes have figured out the dollar isn't worth what it was so even their prices are now climbing.

One by one, the eurozone, the Swedes, the Swiss and now even the Japanese, are turning off the tap of ultra-cheap credit that has flushed the global system for the past year, keeping the ageing asset boom alive.

The "carry trade" - as it is known - is a near limitless cash machine for banks and hedge funds. They can borrow at near zero interest rates in Japan, or 1pc in Switzerland, to re-lend anywhere in the world that offers higher yields, whether Argentine notes or US mortgage securities.

Arguably, it has prolonged asset bubbles everywhere, blunting the efforts of the US and other central banks to restrain over-heating in their own countries.

The Bank of International Settlements last year estimated the turnover in exchange and interest rates derivatives markets at $2,400bn a day.

"The carry trade has pervaded every single instrument imaginable, credit spreads, bond spreads: everything is poisoned," said David Bloom, currency analyst at HSBC.

"It's going to come to an end later this year and it's going to be ugly, even if we haven't reached the shake-out just yet," he said.

All countries are exposed but none as much as the USA. Our rulers keep lying to us and claiming, the budget deficit is "only" 6 to 7% of our GNP which is of course, a very dangerous level but untutored people reading this information seldom realize what would happen if we can't get 7% of our GNP in the form of hard cash.

Crash/tinkle!

Since our GNP is so huge, this 7% is also huge! And since America has outsourced/outsized potential taxpayer's jobs, this means we can't fill this yawning gap by taxing the middle class. The rich can't be taxed at all since they rule us and they intend to keep things this way and besides, they squirrel away their money in off shore accounts, anyway. Since Americans can't tax the people with the money, this means cutting the budget by $500 billion not in ten years but next year. This is impossible unless our government either cuts the military to near zero or kills off most Americans who are dependent upon the government functioning.

There were early signs of panic this week when the Icelandic krone crashed 8pc in two days, setting off dominoes in high-yielding currencies of New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Hungary and Brazil.

The debacle was triggered when the rating agency Fitch downgraded Iceland's sovereign debt, a move that would not normally rattle markets.

The only reason our debt isn't being downgraded is because there are many things America can sell off. We are already hard at work, selling off our ports, our forests, our minerals, our people.

Most of the world is now tightening, with no sign of a fresh credit window opening to keep the game going. This is new. Japan has had the tap on continuously as the trade exploded over the past five years, while America itself became the source of funds after it slashed rates to 1pc at the end of the dotcom bubble, and held them there until June 2004.

Between illegal drug dealers and the explosion in derivative trades, the "dark matter" money will melt away like ice in a heat wave when the various governments crack down on currencies.

Already, the USA is frantically changing the color and design of its currency in preparation of squeezing out the drug trade money yet again. Not to mention gross counterfit monies.

American consumer credit depends very heavily on foreign money pouring in. Interest rates on houses were ridiculously cheap and the mortgages were bundled and resold to hedge funds and overseas investors seeking stable shelter for their money, little understanding how this particular shelter has a very leaky roof.

Namely, when the dominos start to fall in America, people will cease paying for their grossly over inflated in value homes and abandon them, this has happened in the past, can happen at any time. It is no coincidence that all gold rushes in history coincide with world wide depressions. Such as the all famous on in California, the banking systems of the world collapsed in 1848 and the rush was in 1849. Ditto the Alaskan rush. Take a good look at this. These people, mostly city dwellers, hiking up a mountain in winter. The stream of humanity pouring into the dangerous backlands of Alaska to claw gold from rivers and streams was the result of a terrible depression. Just like the Great Depression, the side effects reverberated for a while, translated into a world war.

Just like many analysts refuse to see ahead, one has to focus on what will happen in ten years.

Just like the housing bubble bust. It doesn't happen instantaneously, everywhere. It takes time to pop. Once it is underway, it is nearly impossible to stop. Ditto currency problems. Under Clinton and Rubins, they stopped several currency collapse waves, most spectacularily in Asia. We have fools and liars running things now. Bernanke isn't a liar, his is just a Brownie level type idiot. An innocent who can't think straight, drunk on his new powers.

About Me

Born at Yerkes Observatory, grew up on many observatory mountains and secret government testing grounds, burr under the saddle of the Real Rulers of America since childhood, family black sheep with three bags of wool, pulled down more than one politician in life, winner of the "Struck by Lightning Indoors" award for most hits in lifetime, three direct and seven glancing blows. Now living on a mountain with horses and cats and dogs and chickens and a husband. Yikes.